Top 100 The Ordinary Quotes
#1. Never get so fascinated by the extraordinary that you forget the ordinary.
Magdalen Nabb
#2. I don't know how easy that would be but I'd try just to lead an ordinary life again. Stay out of the papers.
Mark David Chapman
#3. Every event, or appearance, or accident, which seems to deviate from the ordinary course of nature has been rashly ascribed to the immediate action of the Deity.
Edward Gibbon
#4. There are many organizations and individuals advocating for the public interest online - what's good for ordinary people - but other interests are more numerous and powerful than they are. I want that to change. And that's what I want to do next.
Sue Gardner
#5. Not only does a lens distort forms, but the ordinary plate makes an unholy mess of colour in its tone relations. Yellow becomes black, and blue white. Black sunflowers against a white sky - what a travesty!
Walter J. Phillips
#6. A collection of plants is not a landscape, any more than a list of choice words is a poem. The merit is in the design, not the material it is expressed in, and the best designs, like the best poems, make ordinary material significant by its arrangement.
Nan Fairbrother
#7. Now the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men is foreknowledge.
Sun Tzu
#8. The kids kept walking, moving through the Henley's halls like a tide, but when Kat turned to leave, she walked in the opposite directions. She wasn't an ordinary kid, after all.
Katarina Bishop followed no one.
Ally Carter
#9. Gansey threw open his door. Gripping the roof of the car, he slid himself out. Even that gesture, Ronan noted, was wild-Gansey, Gansey-on-fire. Like he pulled himself from the car because ordinary climbing out was too slow.
This was going to be a night.
Maggie Stiefvater
#10. There never has been a great and beautiful character, which has not become so by filling well the ordinary and smaller offices appointed of God.
Horace Bushnell
#11. It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.
George Will
#12. One should arrive at leading one's conscience to a state of development so that it becomes the voice of a better and higher self, of which the ordinary self is a servant.
Vincent Van Gogh
#13. Fish play in the water
birds play in the sky
ordinary beings play on the earth
sublime beings play in display.
Thinley Norbu
#15. Harold says one of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to Facts. It
C.S. Lewis
#16. The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#17. I don't understand the whole thrilling verse, but I love the way poetry turns ordinary words into winged things that rise up and soar!
Margarita Engle
#18. Christ's miracles were vivid manifestations to the senses that He is the Saviour of the body
and now as then the issues of life and death are in His hands
that our daily existence is a perpetual miracle. The extraordinary was simply a manifestation of God's power in the ordinary.
Frederick William Robertson
#19. I think God isn't interested in intervening every time some little bad thing happens. God is interested in getting the message of good news and love and comfort and hope across through people like us, ordinary people, or extraordinary people like Bono.
Philip Yancey
#20. One difference between artists and ordinary people is that artists have big egos. In some cases, it's the only difference.
Charles Atlas
#21. The truth is that I'm constitutionally incapable of doing an ordinary job.
Dylan Moran
#22. It is almost a sadness to my soul that men should be astonished and surprised at an ordinary, tangible evidence of the power of God.
John G. Lake
#24. The demands of Jesus are difficult because they require us to do something extraordinary. At the same time He asks us to regard these [acts of goodness] as something usual, ordinary.
Albert Schweitzer
#25. I told her how many things on earth have a fixed colour. Let us say, the green leaves. In our eyes, a red or a yellow leaf is beautiful. Even better if the leaf is shaded in several hues. So we paint the yellows and reds in our paintings oftener. And we forget the ordinary green, the best in nature.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
#26. As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to ... the worst fate of a writer is to become a writer.
Mary McCarthy
#27. It is not just the history of the Hawaiian islands but the significance of the ordinary people whose lives - many quite extraordinary - make up that history.
Alan Brennert
#28. Genius ... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.
Ezra Pound
#29. We must help men and women see the epic in the ordinary details of life.
Matt Chandler
#30. To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government, you can't believe what they say, and you can't rely on their judgment.
Richard M. Nixon
#31. An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is always possible to be happy.
Augustine Birrell
#32. We meet With few utterly dull and stupid souls: the sublime and transcendent are still fewer; the generality of mankind stand between these two extremes: the interval is filled with multitudes of ordinary geniuses, but all very useful, and the ornaments and supports of the commonwealth.
Jean De La Bruyere
#33. The inspired and expired air may be sometimes very useful, by condensing and cooling the blood that passeth through the lungs; I hold that the depuration of the blood in that passage, is not only one of the ordinary, but one of the principal uses of respiration.
Robert Boyle
#34. When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
Frank McCourt
#35. They were just the ordinary sounds of of people beginning their day, silly raucous, discordant, but they were the most beautiful sounds on earth, the sounds of living people.
Karen Maitland
#36. The ordinary Christian with the Bible in his hand can say that the majority is wrong.
Francis Schaeffer
#37. If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?
George Orwell
#38. On television, it's all just shiny, successful people, and so I feel somebody has to wave a flag for the ordinary people who are not quite sure that they are getting it right.
Rachel Joyce
#39. Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better results by using an ordinary kitchen blender.
Nathan Myhrvold
#40. Adventuring can be for the ordinary person with ordinary qualities, such as I regard myself.
Edmund Hillary
#41. The feeling often comes over me that I am not at all remarkable; it is fun to plan a career, but in all probability I shan't turn out a bit different from any other ordinary person.
Jean Webster
#42. When I'm playing a character like Jonathan in Ripley's Game I want to be in the moment when he's feeling pain; this very ordinary person who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances.
Dougray Scott
#43. Nobody sees the obvious, nobody observes the ordinary. There are more miracles in a square yard of earth than in all the fables of the Church.
Robert Anton Wilson
#44. When I asked Robert Spitzer about the possibility that he'd inadvertently created a world in which ordinary behaviours were being labelled mental disorders, he fell silent. I waited for him to answer. But the silence lasted three minutes. Finally he said, 'I don't know.
Jon Ronson
#45. Champions don't do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they've learned.
Charles Duhigg
#46. The more one lives alone on the river or in the open country, the clearer it becomes that nothing is more beautiful or great than to perform the ordinary duties of one's daily life simply and naturally.
Rabindranath Tagore
#47. All ordinary phenomena can be explained by the actions and the motions of particles. For
Richard Feynman
#48. Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he is talking.
G.K. Chesterton
#49. The discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary,
Gloria Steinem
#50. No more sounds emerged as he walked through the forest, save the whisper of the leaves above. Though nothing further appeared out of the ordinary, he knew one thing for certain.
He was not alone.
Madeline Martin
#51. Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down". My eyes are seeing through what the ordinary men call a mirage!
Bayode Ojo
#52. One of the difficulties about interviewing people in Rwanda is that the country is trying to get on with ordinary life and some people just don't want to get involved in this.
Tony Greig
#53. When Ke$ha tries to rap like L'Trimm, she sounds like any ordinary lonely teenage girl stuck in a nowhere town, singing along to her radio and dreaming of a party where she's the star. Ke$ha's greatness is that in her voice, you can hear both the loser girl and the star. All hail the Queen of Noi$e!
Rob Sheffield
#54. The corrupt system made the ordinary citizen absolutely powerless and without rights
Sunday Adelaja
#55. I discovered by working with actual glass models that the important thing is the play of reflections and not the effect of light and shadow, as in ordinary buildings.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
#56. I hesitate to use a pathologizing label, but underneath the so-called narcissistic personality is definitely shame and the paralyzing fear of being ordinary.
Brene Brown
#57. When the Bible used that very expression about fighting with principalities and powers and depraved hypersomatic beings at great heights (our translation is very misleading at that point, by the way) it meant that quite ordinary people were to do the fighting.
C.S. Lewis
#58. But Tuesday teaches me that part of living well in ordinary time is letting this day be good. Letting this day be a gift. Letting this day be filled with plenty. And if it all goes wrong and my work turns to dust? This is my kind reminder that outcomes are beyond the scope of my job description.
Emily P. Freeman
#59. We have a way of making the most extraordinary experience ordinary.
We actually work at destroying our miracles ...
Duane Michals
#60. She was struck by the simple truth that sometimes the most ordinary things could be made extraordinary, simply by doing them with the right people ...
Nicholas Sparks
#61. Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary.
Sam Harris
#62. But the tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it, was that Gallop's maternity had rotted her mind - besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting.
Maggie Nelson
#63. I went camping in the Maasai Mara and we moved site every night. I had no idea how spectacular it would be, how removed from ordinary life, or how many animals we would see.
Georgina Chapman
#64. For example, when I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary.
Brene Brown
#65. Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic.
P. F. Strawson
#66. Turns out any ordinary place can be made extraordinary by the presence of the right person.
Aaron Hartzler
#67. The poet has no greater number of muscles than the ordinary conversationalist; he merely has more highly developed muscles and better coordination. And he practises his activity according to a stricter set of rules.
Louis MacNeice
#68. The market is always making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks.
Benjamin Graham
#69. No matter what the other fifty odd weeks of his life offered, here, at least for a few days, he was officially a very special person in an otherwise ordinary world.
Lisa Luciano
#70. I want to stand on the belief that great things are the product of ordinary people who are made great when they stand.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#71. The 'great' commitment is so much easier than the ordinary everyday one.
Dag Hammarskjold
#72. Some trials look as much like the trial of an ordinary criminal case as a Hitchcock film looks like a home movie.
Stephen Gillers
#73. Ordinary Geiger counters, worn on belt clips and resembling pagers, have been in use by the U.S. Customs Service for years.
Barton Gellman
#74. Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb.
Macrina Wiederkehr
#75. But what I do believe is that if you're a girl who was born in Homsea, a girl who lives in a nothing kind of house with an ordinary kind of family, then you can't know everything about the world and that it's probably good to keep an open mind about things, just in case.
Karen Tayleur
#76. Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travelers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path across lots will turn out the higher way of the two.
Henry David Thoreau
#77. For envy, like lightning, generally strikes at the top Or any point which sticks out from the ordinary level. LUCRETIUS, De Rerum Natura Our envy always outlives the felicity of its object.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#78. I think there's a mythology that if you want to change the world, you have to be sainted, like Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela or Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Ordinary people with lives that go up and down and around in circles can still contribute to change.
Jody Williams
#79. I am an ordinary man who worked hard to develop the talent I was given. I believed in myself, and I believe in the goodness of others.
Muhammad Ali
#80. The ordinary focus on what they're getting. The extraordinary think about who they're becoming.
Robin Sharma
#81. The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.
Graham Swift
#82. The Bible is no ordinary book. The words are like medicine to your soul, and it has the power to change your life!
Joyce Meyer
#83. Names are important. They have to be neither too ordinary nor too queer, just a name, like a face, that'll go along with the crowd.
Winston Graham
#84. We search for the ordinary when we are surrounded by the extraordinary.
Daniel H. Wilson
#85. If the attainment of peace is the ultimate objective of all statesmen, it is, at the same time, something very ordinary, closely tied to the daily life of each individual.
Eisaku Sato
#86. Each of us is a moving center, a space of divine mystery. And though we spend most of our time on the surface in the daily details of ordinary existence, most us hunger to connect to this space within, to break through to bliss, to be swept away into something bigger than us ...
Gabrielle Roth
#87. The day had begun like any other ordinary day for Barnabas Crackle. That is to say, as extra-ordinarily as his days typically began, which were the usual for our faithful protagonist.
Brooke Warra
#89. If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.
Joanna R. Macy
#90. The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.
Emile Zola
#91. Perhaps you don't see yourself in animation," he said with a smile. "It's true your features are quite ordinary, but they become lively when you talk and you have what are called 'speaking eyes.' They shine with the light of your quick mind.
Jo Beverley
#92. What you mean to me is something out of the ordinary, cause even a whole of a dictionary won't be able to describe it!
Andy Flynn
#93. I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me. (Brewster 1860, p. 331)
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#94. Every ordinary thing in your life is a word of God's love: your home, your work, the clothes you wear, the air you breathe, the food you eat ... the flowers under your feet are the courtesy of God's heart flung down on You! All these things say one thing only: "See how I love you."
Caryll Houselander
#95. In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#96. For though she was ordinary, she possessed health, wit, courage, charm, and cheerfulness. But because she was not beautiful, no one ever seemed to notice these other qualities, which is so often the way of the world.
M.M. Kaye
#97. When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#98. The ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes
T. S. Eliot
#99. I usually write about ordinary people and ordinary things, but Paul Farmer is the least ordinary person I've ever met ... He's the leader of a small group of people who hope to cure a sick world, and I hope my book can help in some small way.
Tracy Kidder
#100. Exactly that girl, not the prettiest, but the no-makeup and kind of ordinary-looking girl he'd chosen to be happy
Donna Tartt
